* Posts by Where is Ben

11 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Nov 2009

Chilean clock-cooking could cause computer chaos

Where is Ben
Thumb Up

Domain Controllers

Surely businesses could just change the time on their domain controller and let all the little slave PC's update.

That's how I'd set it up.

Kudos to the government though for giving everyone no notice whatsoever.

Researcher warns of iPhone phishing peril

Where is Ben

...or...

Further to my previous post...

Apple could amend the safari browser to display the padlock symbol in the status bar at the top (next to battery symbol for example).

Where is Ben

There's an App for that

Have the banks release an app that on an un-jailbroken phone will open a dedicated custom browser session to the bank website (not redirect to Safari etc).

Then have a disclaimer saying. If you are using an iOS device to access this site then please use our <appstore_link>app</appstore_link> to use online banking.

That and some common sense.... job done.

Credit cards get colour screens

Where is Ben
Stop

Format Wars for Debit Cards

I'm sorry, this Microsoft Windows powered ATM cannot read the iOS card you have inserted.

...or consider this situation....

"Hello, bank of money. How can I help?"

"Hi there. I'm afraid I've lost my card/card's been stolen/card has worn out. Could I please get a replacement."

"Certainly. Now my records indicate you had a super-duper card with built in cleverness. A replacement card will be £65 plus VAT at 20%, that's £78 in total. How would you like to pay for that? We accept most major clever cards."

"Go to hell."

Ubisoft undone by anti-DRM DDoS storm

Where is Ben
Stop

That kind of mentality...

...is not going to get you very far in life.

If it was the BEST game in the world I think I would pick it up and play it, possibly on my console instead of PC; depending on how shitty my net connection was.

I don't agree with the DRM but that kind of boycotting isn't going to help. It will just cause you misery.

Microsoft hit with lawsuit over Xbox memory card ban

Where is Ben
Stop

You stepped on my toes. I'll sue you.

@Shady, Dapprman & Doc Spock.

I'm with you guys on this one. Datel shouldn't be suing Microsoft because they were trying to be cheeky. They should just swallow the bitter pill and look for a workaround/alternatives.

I'm not saying 3rd party products should be banned entirely. They definitely serve a purpose and keeping people like Apple and Microsoft in check is one of them. What I'm saying is that Microsoft are right on this one. They thought that people were starting to take the piss and so clamped down. Well within their right to do so. There can't be a monopoly on someone's proprietary products

@RegisterFail.

PC gaming isn't shitty and crap. PC gaming is more open to experimentation and pushing the limits of what a game can do. Without PC gaming and people modding things we wouldn't have half of the great ideas and games we have now. If you're talking about multiplayer games then either you a) Improve, b) Stop playing, c) Turn to consoles.

Don't put down PC gaming because you're a sore loser.

Ofcom talks to spook firm on filesharing snoop plan

Where is Ben
Pirate

What a crock

Why don't the government just take all the money that they were going to spend on this crock and make the most pirated goods cheaper and easier to obtain.

For example. Movies are pirated. I'm not talking about camcordered rubbish, I'm talking DVD rips from different global regions available before release date. What about TV series, that get recorded off the telly and up on torrent within 3 hours (with all the adverts removed).

Now if you spent your millions on a service that allowed people to stream - in HD - a movie from an online rental service for the same price it would cost to rent it from a shop AND to be able to do this on the day of release not 4 months later (Hope you're reading this Sky Box Office / Sky Movies / BTVision / XBox Live Marketplace people) or maybe have a TV episode available online and for download at TV resolution for free at the same time it is aired on TV with no DRM, time limits or rental price, then maybe piracy of these things would go down. Most of the money would probably be spent on negotiations and meetings with the providers of the media and getting them to agree to it, but at least it would be well spent.

If you think about it one of the reasons piracy is there is because people want something they can not obtain normally. Suppliers should be looking to this to learn not just trying to prevent it. Ask yourselves why is my stuff being pirated to start with?

Think about the music industry, they tried for years to can illegal MP3 file sharing. It took them that long to realise people wanted to download music and for music stores to open up. Now music downloads are often outselling shop sales!

So Phorm, I mean, CView... well whilst they're calculating their profit margins more and more servers will switch to encryption (which nowadays isn't gonna kill the kit it's running on much more than none encrypted) and people will start running their entire web experience through an encrypted channel. That'll be a big middle finger to the ISP's.

Microsoft feeds Excel to supercomputer

Where is Ben
Megaphone

Excel propels our business forward

Since I started at my current company I have automated many laborious processes and improved efficiency dramatically by "misusing" excel. Yes, I suppose I could've used any other office product with VBA built in, but excel is my weapon of choice. (I also make and run PHP apps on a little web server too and really that's my real weapon of choice, but it's beside the point)

Why? Because as Paul 87 pointed out, the cost of creating these applications externally or as a compiled program would've been tremendous and as Mark 110 said, this would've also taken forever to get agreed and pushed through, meanwhilst we repeatedly carry out the same monotonous time wasting tasks that make work such a pain in the arse.

The best misuse of excel I've seen is someone that resized all the cells to be small squares ( a few pixels square ) and wrote a macro to flood fill the cells with colour then animated a rotating cube! - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php

BUT.... If you write something in excel that can take 45 hours to run then you've gone in the wrong direction. You don't need a supercomputer, you need your head examined. Similarly the muppets who embed uncropped screenshots in a spreadsheet and then make a text box to explain what is going on need to be shot.

Microsoft, you've gone in the wrong direction. If you want to attach supercomputers to Office then why don't you do something useful like maintain responsiveness whilst saving autorecover information, or improving the fidelity of the print preview so you don't get random thick gridlines everywhere, or allowing interactive collaboration on the same document by implementing row/cell/sentence level locking.

Channel 4 to become Channel 3D tonight

Where is Ben
FAIL

Sainsbury's, C4 & Quality Street Wrappers...

... gives a ratings boost for a week whilst people fall over themselves to try something "fun".

Whereas if they removed Paul O'Grady, Historical trawls through the wastefulness of the monarchy, JLS and Hannah f**king Montana and replaced them with programs that can stimulate someone with a positive IQ might give them a permanent ratings boost.

Effort: 6

Idea: 3

Waste-of-money: 10

US boffins build, test working 2-qubit quantum processor

Where is Ben
FAIL

Q: What is 2 + 2 ? A: 4

" At the moment, the 2-qubit processor is only 79 per cent accurate."

Q: What is 2 + 2 ?

A: 4.

Q: What is 2 + 2 ?

A: 4.

Q: What is 2 + 2 ?

A: 3.

Q: What is 2 + 2 ?

A: Twelfty?

Sounds great.

HP plans a trillion-sensor global stethoscope

Where is Ben
Terminator

Is that similar to...

...the sensors they put in Alt, Ctrl and Delete keys so that by holding down any two the imminent finger press on the third is sensed early and the PC springs into life.

I wondered how my PC always knew when I was threatening it.

Maybe HP could also use it to know when your kicking the case in fury and automatically raise a support call for you. This way they could ring you first and save you a trip through the telephone menu system of doom.